A Princess of the Aerie (20 page)

“Nobody appreciates art anymore,” Jak said, and Dujuv smiled at that and said, “Toktru.” Jak was happy just to be where he
was, for the first time in a long time.

J
ak, Shadow, and Dujuv had all CUPVed on a sunclipper before, Shadow most of all. Dujuv started off replacing panels in the
auxiliary propulsion tubes, grumbling amiably that it was just like being back in the Spatial, but after three days he was
rotated to the reactor room to broaden his experience. Jak started outside in the rigging, doing the never-ending untangling,
separating, and mending of lines; it was challenging work, moderately dangerous because monosil cables were so fine that they
could sever a limb with very little force. Shadow, with much more experience—he was a proficient astrogator, and he always
traveled as a CUPV on his many voyages—worked in the worryball.

In between CUPV duties, there were the endless amusements of shipboard social life: games and sports plus all the passionate
little clubs that followed opera, or flatscreen film, or poetry, or anything that could be something to talk about. Dujuv,
with few people around who could really give him a workout at any sport, was in danger of boredom for a day or two until Phrysaba
invited him into the Ancient Languages Club, which was just starting a project of reading Late Medieval and early space-era
Mexican poetry; soon he was constantly practicing his Spanish, murmuring back and forth to his purse.

Shadow was fond of chess, poker, and go. The Rubahy approach was different from the human, which made it more interesting
to play each other, the Rubahy trying to grasp why humans disliked purely ground-taking go, or emphasized bluffing, the humans
trying to dak why the Rubahy so valued knights, and what they meant by the “rhythmic backflow” of a hand.

When he wasn’t with Phrysaba, who seemed to want to spend all of their time together just chatting and making love, Jak spent
as much time as he could at Disciplines katas, performed while interacting with viv. The Disciplines were the climax of a
story at least two thousand years long, the story of how humans became fighters, through a progress from necessity to raw
sport to refined art to interactive game and finally to a True Way (in the sense of Principle 158: “Respect every True Way,
but not because it is a True Way; distrust every True Way but keep in mind that it may be a True Way”). They were endlessly
time-consuming and fascinating, and Jak had been introduced to them young enough to have no memory of having resisted them.

Each blow, stroke, shot, throw, block, or burn was executed seven times on each side; for each, your fist, foot, blade, elbow,
knee, forehead, pistol, or other weapon must be exactly on trajectory, or in your viv goggles the out-of-place, off-target
parts of your body would glow, in colors for which direction you were off spatially, the brightness indicating the error in
timing. About half of the time, now, Jak could get all the way through the Disciplines, 1,918 attacks beginning with a left
jab at the larynx and finishing with a right backhand diagonal eye-to-ankle burn, covering unarmed, short blade, long blade,
slug thrower, and beam combat, in about an hour, attacking slightly slower than once every two seconds, with his virtual body
black the whole way.

Of course his only serious, trained opponent—Bex Riveroma—in his only real fight, ever, had wanged the living shit out of
Jak. And no matter how many times Jak dove into the Disciplines, or how attentively he tried to work the katas, or how passionately
he pursued them, he could not seem to defeat that horrible Sesh-craving. His ache for the Princess was a screaming monkey
that sat by his side when he meditated, chattered in his ear while he warmed up, shrieked at him all through the katas, and
seized his attention again, undiminished, the moment that he dragged his exhausted body out of the centrifuge and to the showers;
compared to the challenge of shutting that out, Bex Riveroma had been a teddy bear.

On his first day off, as Jak was just stuffing his fighting suit into his bag to head for the gym, Pabrino dropped by. Pabrino
was eighteen, a skinny young heet who would be handsome as soon as he filled out and added some grace to his height—a potential
Great Master, or even higher, at Maniples. A couple of years ago when Jak had played him, it had been grotesquely unequal;
within a year, before he turned seventeen, Pabrino had been declared a full Master, and there was talk of his being a Great
Master within the next year.

Jak had assumed Pabrino would not want to play with him for the same reason that Jak didn’t want to play Scrabble against
a hamster. But Pabrino arrived with viv sets ready to go, and a room already rented, and said, “I know this is short notice
but I just got dismissed from a shift early, and I was thinking maybe we could play.”

“Sure, if you don’t mind my being totally inept.”

“You’re epter than anybody else on the ship right now is ept, pizo, except Shadow, and I need a tune-up against someone human.
We’ll be in Mercury orbit for six weeks, and I’m playing a dozen Masters, two of them Great Masters, with maybe even an exhibition
match against a retired Greater Master. And I was looking at your numbers from your last season for PSA. Your game is a lot
better than it was when we played before. Now, do I get a friendly match with an old pizo?”

“Absolutely of course, toktru.”

Every few hundred years human culture seemed to spontaneously generate a game with no known author, limitless challenges,
and an odd combination of extreme simplicity in concept with a complexity in execution that would baffle any but the finest
minds. Chess, bridge, go, and belludi had each been such; Maniples was the latest, if you could call a six-hundred-year history
“latest.” It was nominally a battle between two equal sides over a Mars-sized planet with a randomly chosen configuration
of exactly equal land and water, using the forces a minor military power might have on hand. Of course there were no known
actual empty planets like the one fought over, any more than there were perfectly level battlefields without cover as there
were in chess and go, or perfectly competitive markets as in belludi.

In Maniples, when combat occurred between pieces, the circumstances of the combat were determined by the play up to that moment,
but the combat itself was fought as a duel in viv. A player with combat skills might, on occasion, fight off an ambush, or
make a less than sterling set of moves come out right, against a weaker combatant.

The match puzzled Jak. He won the coin flip and started, as Green, with Pabrino playing Black. Pabrino’s opening game was
clearly not about winning; his adroit fakes and sudden reversals were built around very unfavorable sacrifice ratios, so that
he stripped Jak of all his major pieces (except the battlestation, which was the equivalent of the king in chess), but left
Jak with large advantages in B&Es and submersible aircraft, plus one warshuttle (of the nine he began with) still remaining.

Clearly Pabrino was so far ahead of Jak that he was just playing with him, but there had to be some point to the play; the
younger man was not the sort of egomaniac who would be doing all this just to show that he could. Jak was supposed to do something;
the standard thing to do at this point would be to resign, but they were only twenty minutes into the game.

Well, the first rule of any competition is that you work with what you have; no point wishing to be a genius at Maniples,
any more than to wish for longer arms to box with or bigger lungs to run with. Unable to concentrate on a few big pieces that
would take the lead for and in turn be supported by the small ones, Jak fragmented his forces further and approached things
in the spirit of Principle 22: “In conflict, if you are the flea, do what harm you can; if you are the dog, scratch no harder
than necessary.”

Jak’s Green B&Es strapped on their missiles or bombs, got on their little transport craft, and began trying to filter across
the planet’s surface into Black territory. His aircraft popped low when they flew, just enough to scout, staying submerged
most of the time. Quietly, as his scouts developed a picture of a major attack shaping up in the northeastern quadrisphere,
Jak moved his battlestation, so that the attack would be exposed about ten minutes before it expected to be, and prepared
his warshuttle to pop over the horizon 180 degrees away. It was always possible that one of his smaller units might get a
chance to lock a missile on to the Black battlestation, the move that ended the game.

His forward B&Es moved farther into the northeastern quadrisphere, and at a cost of three beanies sent in on suicide LRPs,
found the main concentration of Pabrino’s forces, right where Jak had guessed they might be, starting to move. He sent every
other beanie within reach forward, tasking each of them to do as much harm as possible. Almost immediately one of them nailed
a low-passing Black orbicruiser with a surprise missile hit.

Meanwhile Jak’s battlestation descended ever lower, well below synchronous orbit, heading northeast. Then Jak was tied up
in viv combat for a while; he and Pabrino fought a dozen small combats as Jak’s B&Es and submersible aircraft covered Pabrino’s
forces with pinprick attacks.

Since Jak was always attacking with low-value forces, the exchange was almost always in his favor on paper—each attacking
beanie or submersible aircraft cost Pabrino far more than their nominal worth, just as if Jak had been playing chess with
nothing but pawns and Pabrino had had nothing but rooks. But since every attack amounted to a suicide attack, and low-valued
forces were all Jak had, this couldn’t go on long. Still, Pabrino’s forces were in very satisfactory disarray when Jak’s battlestation
cleared the horizon, and, a whole planet away, Jak also launched his warshuttle.

The battlestation put a gratifying amount of fire all over Pabrino’s scattered forces, and his matériel losses were huge.
But then Jak’s sneak attack warshuttle was pounced on by a waiting Black orbicruiser, and three man-carried missiles, sitting
quietly in concealed forward positions, locked on his battlestation. The game was over, with another win for Pabrino.

As they pulled off their viv helmets, Jak saw that his tove was panting, sweaty, and pale. “Are you all right?”

“You nearly had me. That was magnificent, Jak. Just what I needed. You’re pretty amazing—I knew I could count on you but I
didn’t know how much.”

“Count on me for what?”

“To improvise well.” Pabrino bent over and rested his hands on his knees, sucking in more cool air. “Maniples has gotten stale,
pizo. I know that, even if most of the Masters don’t. Look at games from a hundred years ago, when most of today’s Masters
were apprentices, and they’re no different from today. Nobody at the top rank has had to play under extreme conditions or
any way other than by the book for decades. So nobody knows anything about it, except the stuff they learned back when they
were beginners—and what they mostly learned then was not to get into those situations. Maniples is getting to be a game of
mastering the book and being good at viv.”

“You think you’re good enough to change that?”

“I’m good—good enough to find almost all of the last century of recorded games boring—and I want to.”

“Weehu. Well, I would have to say that even knowing I was losing, that was the most interesting game I’ve played in years.”
Jak was stripping out of his viv suit, and he reached for a cold glass of juice. “Public baths after this?”

“Toktru. Speck we can get in a couple more matches before Mercury?”

“As many as you like,” Jak said. The young genius had shown him twenty things in that game that he’d never known about Maniples
before. Next season PSA might do better than anyone expected.

* * *

One night, when his tove had a work shift, Jak and Phrysaba were lying in the cabin he shared with Dujuv, cuddled after lovemaking.
“Jak, I feel funny about some things. Will you ever get over this obsession with the Princess? I mean, I know she had you
conditioned and you had no choice—”

“Uh, they say it wears off but never completely.”

She sat up in bed, leaned forward, kissed his cheek, and breathed in his ear, “Do you love me?”

“You’re important to me and I like you a lot. I like sex with you.”

“And since you didn’t just start off with yes, that means you don’t.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you?”

“I don’t know.”

“That witch!” Phrysaba squeezed Jak as if trying to mash Sesh out of him. “She was so
evil
while she was on the ship—ordering people around and objecting to everything that was just normal shipboard procedure and
… she particularly hated
me
…”

Jak felt the rage boiling up. He kept his voice very level and said, “Remember my conditioning. I’m getting furious with you
for saying such things.”

She made a soft little fist and lightly pounded on his chest. “You’re not open and free and friendly the way you were before,
and she’s just using you—she’ll never be yours, she’s a princess, and even if you can overlook that, she sure can’t—and so
here you are, hurting inside, I can tell, and because she had you conditioned, right now you can’t even listen to me call
her a nasty exploitive bitch, which isn’t half of what she is.”

Jak felt all his muscles tense and rage rising along his spine; he raised his hand in warning. Phrysaba grabbed it, pulled
it to her mouth, and kissed the mound below his thumb, firmly, tenderly, and very slowly, pressing it between her lips and
warming it with her breath. Jak’s hand turned and stroked her cheek. She pressed back against it and whispered, “Now roll
over and let me rub the knots out of your back.”

Her soothing, warming fingers paused below his left shoulder blade. “What’s this scar?”

“It’s where they put in the sliver that contains a list of locations for all the evidence of five of Bex Riveroma’s major
crimes. It’s in my liver, someplace hard to find. I guess that was the easiest direction to put it in from—easiest on the
surgeon, not necessarily easiest on me.”